How nice of Louis Austin!  It quite made up for my mortification over the camphor pudding!

Pittsburg has been called “hell with the lid off,” and other insulting names.  I have always thought it beautiful, especially at night when its furnaces make it look like a city of flame.  The lovely park that the city has made on the heights that surround it is a lesson to Birmingham, Sheffield, and our other black towns.  George Alexander said that Pittsburg reminded him of his native town of Sheffield.  “Had he said Birmingham, now instead of Sheffield,” wrote a Pittsburg newspaper man, “he would have touched our tender spot exactly.  As it is, we can be as cheerful as the Chicago man was who boasted that his sweetheart ’came pretty near calling him “honey,"’ when in fact she had called him ’Old Beeswax’!”

When I played Ophelia for the first time in Chicago, I played the part better than I had ever played it before, and I don’t believe I ever played it so well again. Why, it is almost impossible to say.  I had heard a good deal of the crime of Chicago, that the people were a rough, murderous, sand-bagging crew.  I ran on to the stage in the mad scene, and never have I felt such sympathy!  This frail wraith, this poor demented thing, could hold them in the hollow of her hand....  It was splendid!  “How long can I hold them?” I thought:  “For ever!” Then I laughed.  That was the best Ophelia laugh of my life—­my life that is such a perfect kaleidoscope with the people and the places turning round and round.

At the risk of being accused of indiscriminate flattery I must say that I liked all the American cities.  Every one of them has a joke at the expense of the others.  They talk in New York of a man who lost both his sons—­“One died and the other went to live in Philadelphia.”  Pittsburg is the subject of endless criticism, and Chicago is “the limit.”  To me, indeed, it seemed “the limit”—­of the industry, energy, and enterprise of man.  In 1812 this vast city was only a frontier post—­Fort Dearborn.  In 1871 the town that first rose on these great plains was burned to the ground.  The growth of the present Chicago began when I was a grown woman.  I have celebrated my jubilee.  Chicago will not do that for another fifteen years!

I never visited the stock-yards.  Somehow I had no curiosity to see a live pig turned in fifteen minutes into ham, sausages, hair-oil, and the binding for a Bible!  I had some dread of being made sad by the spectacle of so much slaughter—­of hating the Chicago of the “abattoir” as much as I had loved the Chicago of the Lake with the white buildings of the World’s Fair shining on it, the Chicago built on piles in splendid isolation in the middle of the prairie, the Chicago of Marshall Field’s beautiful palace of a store, the Chicago of my dear friends, the Chicago of my son’s first appearance on the stage!  Was it not a Chicago man who wrote of my boy, tending the roses in the stage garden in “Eugene Aram,” that he was “a most beautiful lad”!